When Your Mind Runs Fast But Your Body Is Exhausted

Sheridan Ruth points to a set of decades-old, repeatedly replicated experiments: subjects wired up and told to move their thumb when they see a certain cue show a thumb movement that starts before the brain finishes sending the signal to move it. The finding cuts both ways in the literature, she says, so the honest answer is we do not fully know how much of "deciding" happens consciously. What is clearer is that your nervous system is processing and responding to your environment in real time, often ahead of conscious awareness. We explored the same gap between perception and reality in Your Brain Built the World Before Your Senses Reported It.

Sheridan distinguishes neuroception, closely tied to Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory, from generic advice to listen to your body. It is not simply noticing you are thirsty or tense, it is getting curious about where a bodily reaction is actually coming from: is that tightness in your chest a genuine signal about the person in front of you, or an old pattern being triggered by something that reminds your nervous system of an old wound. That deeper layer, not the surface sensation, is where the real information lives. We mapped a similar distinction in Why Your Nervous System Is Still Solving a Problem That Doesn't Exist.

Sheridan cites her own research at Monash University: 73% of founders are neurodivergent, 35% of entrepreneurs in the US live with dyslexia, and a similar share with ADHD, more often pulled toward entrepreneurship because it rewards their specific wiring than pushed out of traditional work. Ale connects it to a pattern WGW returns to often: tribal societies sent neurodivergent members to the shaman to be trained as healers, not corrected into normalcy. The same traits read as a liability in one environment and a genuine advantage in another. We traced the same reframe in Everyone's Talking About ADHD. Here's What They're Missing.

Sheridan's method starts with what she calls a somatic capacity map: observing exactly how your body responds to different situations for weeks, without trying to change anything first. As the nervous system moves out of chronic threat response, the amygdala, the brain's fear center, measurably decreases in size while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, grows. The result is less reactivity, steadier decisions, and more secure relationships, not from willpower, but from an actual structural shift. That same structural work is what a Quantum Diagnostic Session maps directly, or you can go deeper across a full cohort of The Science of Healing & Enlightenment.

Below is the complete transcript of "When Your Mind Runs Fast But Your Body Is Exhausted," the main conversation with Sheridan Ruth. Read it if you prefer text, or want to search a specific point we covered.

Yeah. So, I think there's, you know, like so many of us who end up in this place where we care deeply about something. There's a whole list of things that were hard for me. That happened in life and I think the one that the obvious the obvious one is that I don't have any hair. Lost my hair when I was a kid. But not important necessarily the details of that. It's more kind of the feeling that that left me with, which is like that there was something wrong. And there was like something wrong with me. And I had to do something to make it better. And so, I got really I suppose concerned with helping other people. I went into community development.

I founded a nonprofit. Really good, but I think it was coming from this place of wanting to wanting to heal externally so that I could feel better inside. Then I went into finance and I was like, well, I'll just make heaps of money and then that'll show how smart I am and how good I am. And then I went through my abusive relationship, ended up an abusive relationship. My ex passed away from suicide shortly after I left. That led through kind of a period of time where I feel like I got to know a really dark side of humans. Pulled myself out of that through yoga therapy and somatic therapy and found myself being invited to provide yoga therapy.

And then where it's the online boom and so everyone's like, you can do online coaching. I was like, oh, wow, I can I can I can do this online. This is really fun. It felt so good. I felt so I had so much energy and it was so true and so good at the time, but I think I fell into this place where then I thought that being in the wellness space and like optimizing my body and I did it Ayurveda certification and I became a wellness coach and I thought if I could just heal all my trauma inside, well, then I then I'll stop feeling so exhausted. And it kind of worked for a little while, but then I got distracted by the perfect business plan and then I thought, no, no, no, no, no.

It's actually just like it's the business plan. It's how I'm making money. If I scale this correctly, if I do this, if I if I then that will finally make me feel safe. If I have this consistent income, then that will finally be the thing. And I just, you know, 20 years of searching for this balance with a mind that works really fast and a body that needs a little bit more time to you know, rest. I just kind of landed in this place where I still use the mindfulness practices, internal family systems, somatic trauma therapy, polyvagal theory. I really like science at the moment. But there's a real sense of I think I've kind of not to say that I've moved on to that part of healing, but I've come to a place where there's not a sense of striving for the healing and striving to get out of burnout.

It's more like a conversation and a balance that you're having with your body in every season and with your business in every season and that's landed me here talking to you and the amazing people. Lovely, lovely. It's It sounds Every time these stories are kind of like touching familiar points. It's always like we get so brainwashed about putting the carrot stick in front of our eyes and then constantly chasing it and and never getting it there until the point that you really believe, okay, wait a second. This isn't working. Let's try to really kind of like shift it upside down and try a completely different method.

So for for anyone that is here today listening to this conversation, it's not the first time that at Wholegrain Wisdom we talk about the subconscious, about the body, about somatic experiencing in general, but I think we may not have yet received like the perfect explanation of what is all about. Like why do we need to care about this? Like you know, everybody talks about, ah yeah, listen to your body and do and do this and do that, but what does it even mean? Like especially for people like us that come from environments and situations where we pro I don't know if it was exactly like that for you, but for me it's always been forget about the body.

Like don't listen to it. You need to like kind of like push your way out through willpower. So, for anyone that is still there, that is still wondering, because you know, I I there may be the group of those that that really got it. And from the other people, they've seen like, "Okay, they they they're now living on a beach, and they don't really work, and and and they're happy like that, and and they they lost kind of like drive, you know, and and this this fire inside." Is it Is it that true? And how how do you get through a sustainable path in that sense? So, I think there's two questions here, and I'm going to answer them on top of each other.

First of all, this to ground us, this idea of somatic intelligence, so body-based intelligence. So, your your ability to sense, to interpret, to respond to the world through your how you intake the world. We know that we perceive. There's what happens, or there's my hand in front of me, and then there's how I perceived my hand. And we know that we perceive things differently. We we That is shaped by We'll talk maybe We talk about how perception is shaped. But, all of these different traditions Go go go all in with science, absolutely. Don't don't look back at what it is. Well, it depends on what you're It depends on the culture. It depends on even how progressive you want to get.

So, originally we had the five senses, right? Taste, what is it? Taste, hearing. Oh, you put me on this spot. I'm like literally thinking about it. Yeah, all the five. Yeah, yeah. All the five senses, right? And then there's new science that came out that was like, "Maybe we have 32 senses." But, what I am more interested in is something called neuroception. And neuroception is very closely linked to polyvagal theory, and we'll send you resources and references for all of this stuff. I'll make sure you have it in the show notes. And it's this understanding that your body is taking in information, then your brain has to process it. Some people feel a gut sense.

Some people have clairvoyance abilities or clair sentience. So, it's all of these possible abilities to sense, and it takes it in. Now, there's this great debate in philosophy and psychology, which is do we even have willpower? And there's studies that show and they've been replicated decades over where someone would be what they are hooked up to a wire and they're told to move their thumb when they see a certain object. So, they're measuring their brain receiving the information of like the the thing on the screen, then they're measuring so they're receiving information, then they measure when their thumb moves, and they measure when the brain sends the signal to the thumb to move.

And what they found pretty consistently was that the thumb actually moves before the brain sends the information. And so, then you find other studies that say the opposite. So, we don't know. Like, are we responding with our willpower? Are we responding automatically?

And so, what the invitation is with somatic intelligence and specifically neuroception is to stop thinking necessarily that your mind has as much control as you think and start thinking about how your body particularly your nervous system, meaning the nerves that run through your entire like sensory system all the way down to your fingers from your your brain stem at the back of your neck, and your brain in particular the limbic system which is one of the older, like more central parts of the brain that talks a lot about or experiences and categorizes emotion and experiences and sights and sounds. Is responding in real time. So, when we say, "Listen to your body." When I say that, I'm actually asking you to go much deeper than listening to your body any other time that you've listened to your body.

We do want you to look at, you know, why your chest might tighten around a certain type of person or why you don't drink water when you're thirsty. But, I'm not saying listen to your body as in just drink water when you're thirsty or if it makes you tense up then you should move away, but go deeper and be curious about where is that coming from? Is that tension coming from a deep like knowing that that person is not good for me? Is that tension coming from maybe for some reason that those patterns that that person has remind me of a sense of insecurity I have, but to be more curious.

And I think honestly if we like really take it down just to move through all the different stuff and it might sound to some people who like more logic this might find difficult to to think it's as this philosophical or spiritual, but any action that comes rooted in fear is going to create fear-based patterns in your system. And any action that when you go deep comes down rooted in love or truth or purity or whatever you might feel that that thing is, that's what I'm talking about when I talk about somatic intelligence. That's the organizing principle of the universe if you think about it in that way. And some people that doesn't resonate, but you still know that feeling that I'm talking about.

And you know that you've followed it sometimes. Yeah, I feel like like there are so many different angles that you can kind of look at this if you want to go even deeper into the kind of like spiritual energetic work, you can call in into like your your astral chart data, your energy type of human design. I mean, every other possible tool on this and it's and it's so powerful especially now with AI cuz you can really like if you really want to connect the dots, it's way way easier. You don't need to be extremely expert in all of these domains. You can really leverage this intelligence to really connect the different points. And and there is a lot of powerful work that that we are doing with the community at Wholegrain Wisdom that of course people like you shared on and and and many other practitioners are bringing forward.

Now, I'm curious to understand in the environment of entrepreneurship, considering especially that 73% out out of all the founders, so the full majority is neurodiverse. We said it in the introduction. How like how is this even more relevant for people like us that that really have a big problem stopping and and and slowing down and and listening to our senses? There's two things here. I think number one is that entrepreneurship, the skills that it's entrepreneurship requires to be successful, and the study that we can link will share this often times tend to overlap with the skills that neurodivergent individuals have. And so there's this funny kind of like chicken and egg thing here.

And so it's like it's it provides a space for you to follow your curiosities, follow your skills, to think really big. I think AI is really interesting for neurodivergent brains, but also there's some not very helpful parts of that. So, we have to keep that in mind when we're using it and balancing that out as it relates to the body. But, where neurodivergents in general really thrive when you have autonomy to be creative, when you can use your brain for problem-solving that is interesting. When you can align with your specific way of thinking.

So, like maybe you like to really understand like the high-level high-level understanding of something and then you can go really deep down into the problems or maybe you work really well in hyperfocus sprints and then you like to just kind of pull away, but there's necessarily kind of I think for neurodivergents when you give them enough support, them, us, enough support, but also enough autonomy and the right environment where you can connect into your intelligence, your able to create things that nobody else would be able to create. And even if you look back into some ideas and theories and arguments as to why we even have neurodivergent brains, that's for a reason.

So, entrepreneurship creates an and provides the environment for that to occur. And also those are skills that helps it that help entrepreneurship be successful. And also there are all of these risks and all of these diff difficulties about having a neurodivergent brain or a sensitive nervous system or whatever that might be that make entrepreneurship maybe a little bit more challenging or a bit different. For a lot of How do you How do you work with neurodivergent minds? Like you you if any if if I would have to come to your studio or whatever you you visit online or something like any we would have to start a process. Guide me through a little bit here so maybe people can start to understand what what does it really mean to do this kind of work?

I think the biggest thing is coming with a lens of curiosity. So I think my biggest gift is coming with real genuine curiosity and kind of co-partnering with curiosity and that makes it easier for it would make it easier for you to be curious about maybe some of the habits that you have and we can be curious and say well like how do we make this a super like a superpower. How do we make the way that your body works or the way that your mind understands is a superpower and I think the biggest thing is like whenever we whenever I work with a client the first month or so is doing a little bit of what we call a somatic capacity map. We do this as well and I have I have a five-week program that teaches this which is literally just observing.

We're just getting really clear about how your body responds to different scenarios and then and not changing anything. And then we kind of zoom out and we say okay cool. This is how your body responds. We're not going to argue with this. We're going to build things that work around it. I'm going to set it up so that you can grow within it naturally and that amount of freedom like wow it just it gives it gives you the the passion to go. I don't know do you think that that would be helpful or how you would expect it to occur or there other things? Well for me the experience it's been I have a I will answer you with a question and and then I'll tell you a little bit what I've been observing from my end.

Do you feel that neurodivergence is something that can completely vanish in the right circumstances? Or is it something that is always there in the background and you just have to deal with it? Or how know how to kind of like work with it as you said? I don't know. I think that sometimes it's like, you know, we can't see exactly what's happening inside of the brain all the time. So, I think it's more like maybe if you set up your life in a way that you really thrive, then the discomfort vanishes.

And you might say that that's your neurodivergence vanish in but it's really difficult to know and also I think there's a lot of there's a lot of possibility and hope that and I think honestly, I think the reality is that there are certain parts of us that might identify with neurodivergent symptoms and whether or not they are true neurodivergence or caused by trauma. When we set our lives up and we love and care for ourselves in a way that already starts to heal the nervous system and return it back to a safe of place of security, then possibly it does change because what happens is like your nervous system, your body becomes your amygdala the site in your brain decreases in size and your prefrontal cortex increases in size.

So, you have more capacity to be less impulsive. You have more capacity for executive function. You have less emotional roller coasters. You experience more secure attachments and better relationships. And these are all symptoms of neurodivergence decreasing and it could be because you're providing healing to your body. But then I become to end up in this like argument of were you really neurodivergent in the first place? Right? And so difficult It's so difficult to know. But I don't know if it really matters. As long as you're happy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like for me, the the kind of example, but of course this is absolutely biased and and non-statistical relevant non-statistically relevant for me.

I recognized very lately of being ADHD. I always been kind of like the weird in the room, but I never got like into the path of being diagnosed and so forth so on and so forth. And since I started living in nature all day long all year long, I completely completely changed this kind of patterns. Plus all of the work of healing the traumatic experiences trapped in the fascia of the body. Like to these two things together, they created something that not even 10 years of meditation brought me even close to getting there. So, this is kind of like my my theory, but of course this is more kind of you know it's more of a vision than a theory.

It's like, you know, I I always make the example that in the past in in tribal societies, neurodivergent individuals, they they were not considered they were not treated, they were not like excluded by the group. They were actually brought to the shaman because they would they they they were recognized as having special powers. And the shamans were were keeping them and training them to become the next generation of healers. So, right now, the Western society just puts you on meds. Or in other situations, they they kind of like kind of stereotype you, right? Instead of a recognizes as you rightly said, that that those are powers. That this could be powers.

Yeah, and it like pulls you and tries to say be more like everyone else. And I I resonate with what you're sharing and it's There's no scientific background for it, but I struggled with ADHD. I left the country. I just created my life to just follow I did all of As soon as I started doing all I was really struggling emotionally and like with really deep symptoms. Then I started doing all of this somatic therapy, all of this somatic therapy, spending more time in nature. Had years where I didn't identify at all with any of the symptoms. Absolutely not, not a problem. Just living my life, everything working really well. Came back to Australia.

Immediately as soon as I started functioning in this I didn't really have a large community and I was like trying to like I guess like put myself back in the city in the 9-5 and I kind of like make myself work in this neurotypical environment. That was actually when I got my ADHD diagnosis cuz I was like this is just not working and I can't figure out why. And yeah, I I think that there's validity in that. Yeah. How what do you think today are the most misunderstood traits or actions to be to be taken what what when you not necessarily when you're diagnosed, but also just when when you know that you're that you're different and and and and you get angry often easily or maybe you're just your head is all over the places, you're overstimulated.

Like what what have you felt so far in your in your own work and your own research that is like kind of like the the common knowledge or the common message that you might see anywhere suggested by anyone versus what really really works by in your experience? A lot of things that are coming up for me, but I think the one thing is I think sometimes we forget that the body works in cycles and what I try to advocate for is allowing yourself to know and work in your own cycles. And for some people that means a lot of boundaries and it also means a lot of understanding how to communicate with others based off of needs. And so Marshall Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication is really helpful for this because what I notice some people doing is they're fighting with themself and about that.

I'm really hyper focused and I feel like I shouldn't. And I'm absolutely not saying that should deplete your body because your hyper focused. I just did a podcast episode on why that why we don't do that and how to stop doing that using somatic practices. I'm not saying don't sleep. Sleep is the most important thing that you could probably care about. If you do anything this year, just try to sleep better. And but I think learning your cycles so if you tend to have more energy for this thing at this time of day or if you feel more inclined to work two days a week, four days a week or there will be periods in your life where you will want to work many days a week.

Having enough capacity like body based capacity inside and this is where the somatic therapy comes in to not judge yourself for it and not let other people's opinions about what you should be doing fall in on you. I know a lot of incredibly intelligent neuro diverse founders and they'll go through phases where they just want to work 12 hours a day and then they're just like I'm actually done for a few weeks. And I think it's healthier to respect that instead of calling them like unbalanced or unhealthy. So because then we're like we're creating a second wound on top of on top of what we're already experiencing, which might be difficult in of itself.

So, I think learning about that, listening to that, when we stop being true to the energy that's flowing through our body, that's when we start experiencing burnout. Yeah. Would you just would could can we just summarize and say that industrialization us up completely? Because if you if you think about if you think about it, like I was watching I I I was connecting the dots and and going back into the past. This is a like this is really like the essence of of holding wisdom because it's not just about the science per se, but it's also understanding how we were doing things in the past. And we completely lost track of the moon cycles.

We in the west. We completely lost cycle of the equinoxes and the other period of the year that I remember like the cycles of the of the of solar. And then we have absolutely no idea what's happening in terms of like kind of like astrological energies that are interfering with the electromagnetic patterns on on this planet. We we're not following seasons in the majority of cases unless you're eating healthy, then in in some cases you may know that you should be eating tomatoes instead of cabbage or something. But and then you're going you're you're being forced to be living in an office with artificial lighting that that you up even more the circadian rhythm.

I mean, if I can if I can get anything from what you just said is like if you if you need to learn how to follow your your cycles, you need to also understand what are the cycles around you. Yes, absolutely. You You start with This is This is my nature is so important. You came to You went to nature. I I found cycles. I think I started through my menstrual cycle, and that led back to nature, and it doesn't I think you learn the cycles. We're almost like coming back to them in different ways. Like you went maybe to nature. I went to the cycle within my body in the day, in the month, maybe within the year, and then externally.

But it's such a problem, and I think this is like literally the crux of the work that I do, which is like every single day I just sit with people and figure out how do we do this thing where I'm attuned to the nature in me and the job that I really care about that happens to be in a city with a family that I really care about that happened to also be in a city and you know, when I know this money and I want that and like no, no, no, no, and all of these things. Like how do I be attuned to nature without like no offense, but like running away to Bali. Because we can't all do it. I know. I know.

But sometime sometimes it's probably all in our minds considering all the circumstances that we create for ourselves, but I'm curious to understand a little bit I remember So when we when we chatted before this interview, I discovered you are also a researcher. You're doing some research at the Monash University in Australia. Is there any other data that you feel relevant for this conversation that that that you did you guys discovered through your work? What we were exploring was this idea of whether or not you're pulled because of neurodivergence. And this one was specifically also disability such as or what would be called a disability at dyslexia, dyslexia, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and sensory sensory processing sensitivity.

And we're exploring this idea of these barriers to entry including ADHD to the normal working environment. And this concept in the idea of like are you being pushed into it, you don't have a choice, or are you being pulled into it because it's the correct place for you to land? And I think what is interesting is there's 35% in the US, 35% of entrepreneurs have dyslexia. And that's a really, really large proportion. I think there's something like 27% as well with ADHD. There are a couple of studies that actually found that that was consistently true more for males rather than females, so more males with neuro divergence were pulled into entrepreneurship.

So, I think the inquiry isn't necessarily like figuring out if is this me or not, but almost making an assumption that yeah, you might be different. And coming back to what we were speaking about before, which is you might be different, therefore do it your way. Yeah. Yeah, this is very this is a great piece of wisdom, especially because I feel like neuro divergent people are always chasing the external validation of feeling normal because we we kind of kind of we grew up as the black sheep of the of the herd, right? So, we always had to prove somebody that we were good, that we were worthy or whatever, capable. And so, do by doing so, we try to push the the the rhythms of of of a complete different personality, of a complete different energy profile.

I would say complete even metabolism. Yeah. And this is where we come back where it's like do it your way, but don't forget to do the internal work of releasing this idea that you have to push or that you have to strive, or that you have to prove something. Because a lot of us end up in loops in our head thinking I have to prove this thing, and it's This is where we come back to the idea of perception. You're perceiving the world through perhaps a wound of I have to show you that I'm smart enough. I have to show you that I can. I have to make this thing work so that they see me because I wasn't seen for the skills that I had. So, that is clouding the perception, the emotions that you have, the thoughts that you think.

And we can only think so many thoughts at a time. So, by removing, releasing, processing, healing, integrating, whatever the word is that you want to use for that with somatic practices, whether that is a yoga practice or a somatic therapist or spending time in nature, I don't care your modality, but pick one and do it regularly.

That will actually create the space inside to find all the new thoughts, and I think you you might resonate with this feeling of like locking on, like you're able to kind of use your skills when they're not locked on to healing trauma and resolving a pain from your childhood, you lock them on to resolving whatever this problem is in your business because there's the rest of the other statistics, which is that, you know, about 95% of businesses fail within the first 3 years, and most entrepreneurs are paid less than minimum wage in their respective country. That's also something that we need to speak about, and that's not that fair or something that we want for anyone listening.

Yeah. But it's what happens when you put your energy towards solving the right problems. Exactly. I think if there is one takeaway of this conversation is that A, yes, you're different, and it's not a problem. It's actually a very good blessing, but B, you need to put on the work because all of this being different, if it's kind of like directed in the wrong direction, it's going to suck up all of these energies for survival needs instead of actually pursuing your purpose and your vision and your mission in your life. Yeah, exactly. Love it. Love it. Thanks so much, Sheridan. It's been It's been a pleasure. I don't know if there is any last words you want to leave, where people can find you, how can people support you, how can people work work with you eventually?

Just Let's just close up with with some with some of these contact contact detail part. Yeah, I think for anyone that's curious about exploring the concept, if you put my name, Sheridan Ruth, into Amazon, you'll find my book, Somatic Intelligence for Success, and that will go into what it is that we're talking about and how to access your somatic intelligence. There's a, you know, a three-parts kind of introductory, and it's a lot of kind of how-to, and kind of takes you through it really tangibly. Lovely. Lovely conversation. Thanks so much for sharing the data and the wisdom and all the best. Thank you so much.